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Fol­low­ing four pre­vi­ous acquit­tals, the 50 year old soci­ol­o­gist, teacher and researcher from Côte d’Azur uni­ver­si­ty, has once again been sen­tenced to per­pe­tu­ity by Turkey’s Supreme Court, for a so-called attack that has since been demon­strat­ed for the past 24 years to have been the result of a gas explo­sion  on Istanbul’s spice mar­ket, caus­ing sev­en deaths and 121 wounded.

Held in cus­tody in 1998, tor­tured, sen­tenced to per­pe­tu­ity, she was lib­er­at­ed in 2000 after 36 months in prison. She has always refused to give the police the names of the Kur­dish fight­ers she met in the con­text of her research on the Kur­dish ques­tion. The Court of Appeals inval­i­dat­ed the deci­sions for the acquit­tal on sev­er­al occa­sions,  with Pınar Selek’s refusal to “coop­er­ate” being com­plete the grotesque tri­al seems set for a per­pet­u­al replay with the changes in judges. She was even made the object of an Inter­pol arrest war­rant in 2014.

The jus­tice sys­tem also accused her of being a mem­ber of the Kur­dis­tan Work­ers Par­ty (PKK) and of hav­ing pre­pared and set off a bomb, some­thing the anti-mil­i­tarist and paci­fist mil­i­tant has always denied. Lib­er­at­ed once again in 2003 fol­low­ing an exper­tise that estab­lished the explo­sion was caused by a gas leak, she now lives in France. On the basis of this report and of the with­draw­al of the state­ment by the main wit­ness for the pros­e­cu­tion, Turk­ish tri­bunals acquit­ted Pınar Selak a num­ber of times. This time, the Supreme Court has tak­en up the cause.

The appeal before the Supreme Court bring­ing up the sen­tence yet again only con­cern­sPı­nar Selek and none of the oth­ers who were acquit­ted in this  24 year old matter.

Here is what Pınar says about it her­self, in a dec­la­ra­tion about the sen­tenc­ing to per­pe­tu­ity which she refutes:

“Every­thing is pos­si­ble except for my renewed sen­tenc­ing. Not only is this judg­ment unjust and insane but it is also inhu­man  since the file con­tains sev­er­al expert reports estab­lish­ing the fact that the explo­sion was caused by a gas leak­age, a judg­ment in which not a sin­gle time was my state­ment received on this mat­ter, and where I was not asked a sin­gle ques­tion about it. The tri­al was launched based sole­ly on a state­ment by Abdülmecit O. declar­ing we had act­ed togeth­er, and who lat­er refut­ed his state­ment  before the tri­bunal since it had been extort­ed through tor­ture.  This per­son was acquit­ted with me and his acquit­tal was defin­i­tive with the appeal only being request­ed con­cern­ing my acquit­tal. Thus, this judge­ment has noth­ing to do with the Law.

As the rea­sons for the judge­ment have not yet been pub­lished, I can make no fur­ther comment.”

Anoth­er cas­cade of tri­als will result from this deci­sion, with the pro­ceed­ings already being opened, con­cern­ing indem­ni­ties for the vic­times of the ersatz attack. A relent­less finan­cial harass­ment to follow…

Injus­tice is free-wheel­ing in Turkey.  Every judge wants to demon­strate his alle­giance to the regime. The for­mer copres­i­dent of the HDP Sela­hat­tin Demir­taş, now a detainee in the type F prison of Erdine for for the past five years described it very well in a recent open let­ter. The armed forces on a war foot­ing since the Turk­ish pres­i­dents dec­la­ra­tion that he was prepar­ing a new ter­ri­to­r­i­al grab in North­ern Syr­ia, and always engaged in “spe­cial oper­a­tions” in the Ira­ki bor­der zone, keep the “Kur­dish” top­ic at the top of their agen­da. Arrests of jour­nal­ists have start­ed again and the hunt for “ter­ror­ists” brings us images of arrests wor­thy of those in the 90s. Apart from which, Turkey is sink­ing deep­er into the infla­tion­ist crisis.

The regime, attempt­ing to impose itself at the inter­na­tion­al lev­el by tak­ing advan­tage of the war in Ukraine, con­stant­ly hard­ens its repres­sion against the Kur­dish move­ment. This umpteenth burst of injus­tice fol­low­ing orders is one of its grotesque illustrations.